Blood Feast
After being immortalized and re-introduced to younger audiences through his referencing in the recent movie Juno, Herschell Gordon Lewis has now taken his rightful place as the Godfather Of Gore, the first true filmmaker to showcase graphic violence in cinema and use it as the main selling point of the films in question, starting all the way back in 1963 with this notorious classic, a bad movie on many terms but still a groundbreaking achievement nonetheless. The plot concerns an insane serial killer named Fuad Ramses, the last (and only) worshipper of an ancient Egyptian goddess whose rites require the slaughter of beautiful young girls before taking their body parts to create some sort of concoction that will bring his goddess back to life. As Ramses, Mal Arnold is certainly a campy delight, bringing the requisite creepy weirdness to the part that helped him become a cult horror villain for decades afterwards. The problems start with the portrayal of the cops, who spend much of their screen time sitting around their office just TALKING about the case, which helps deaden the pace at an already sparse 67 minutes. Worse, the main cop (who appears to be in his late forties) embarks upon a romance with the teenage main intended victim of the killer (former Playboy Playmate Connie Mason, who is wretched as expected with her acting), even going so far as to take her out on a date and utter the immortal line “You might be safer with the killer than you are with me!” (har har, asshole). The music consists of a strange percussionary forboding of doom throughout, and the editing, cinematography, and most of the actors leave something to be desired. However, it is the gory murders, which were the first of its kind in screen history, that attracts the marquee value here, with five of them packed into the short running time, consisting of one victim having her eye gouged out to another one having the top of her head lopped off to still another getting her tongue ripped out plus more, which, if nothing else, ensures that to this day there is no way this film could ever seem dated and tame enough to show to children (unlike old standbys like Psycho and Halloween) and helped make Lewis forever remembered as the innovator of the genre whose own opinion of his movies were of the belief that they “were like a Walt Whitman poem. They’re no good, but they were the first.”
7/10